Heroes

Heroes are everywhere, but also in short supply. There is such a shortage in the midst of plenty because our appetite for heroes is insatiable. We need there to be more heroes than there are people alive. No one sells newspapers like a hero. We might then say that the newspaper publishers are the ones who need heroes in order to move product, but in saying this we would be forgetting who it is who buys the newspapers, and that is: us.

We need to be told about heroes. In the old days a Hercules or an Achilles was good enough, but nowadays we need to be told about real-life heroes, who do amazing things in the real world. There are valiant sports heroes and tragic teen idols and tortured rock gods; there are profiles in political courage and humanitarian icons. In short, there are heroes for all kinds of people, and heroes who speak to many aspects of the human condition.

I worry about our need for these "real" heroes. It seems to me that things were better in the old days with Hercules and the twelve labors. That way, everyone knew that the story was fake, and could be inspired by it without worrying that the hero’s real life might not stand up to scrutiny.

These days, we get Jessica Lynch. It might seem harmless that this young woman’s mostly faked heroism was used to inspire us; after all, the inspiration was real, even if the stories were not truthful. But I do not think this sort of thing is harmless. I think it injures us psychically, by taking something we need, heroism, and guaranteeing its universal devaluation. If our real heroes are never really real, after all, what's the point in seeking to be inspired? You'll just be disappointed.

And we wonder why we're all so cynical these days.

In the wars of the past few years, I've been especially moved by the stories of two very different examples of these "real" heroes. There was Pat Tillman, who turned down one grueling job that paid him millions of dollars in favor of another equally grueling job that paid a lot less but that, in his eyes, was of infinitely greater value. And then, in recent days, there has been Marla Ruzicka, who quite simply gave away her life so that innocent victims of war would be remembered as more than mere collateral damage.

But my enthusiasm for both these stories has been continually checked by reality. People won't stop poking holes in my heroes. Tillman's death was incredibly senseless; he died in a friendly fire incident that's apparently messy enough for the Army to cover up. Marla Ruzicka was a grandstander who admired Castro. It seems like, when it comes to real heroes, we take a Rene Belloq attitude: there is no hero we can possess that cannot be taken away.

I don't necessarily think we should stop admiring living people. I do think we should stop turning people into marble statues after they die. It would be healthy for us as a culture if we didn't have to make every person who dies into a martyr. In fact, given what martyrdom means in this day and age, maybe we should get rid of the heroically meaningful death altogether, and let our heroes rest easy in their ambiguous graves. Let every death mean only itself. Death being the profound mystery that it is, I think we can still count on the deaths of our real life heroes meaning an awful lot.

UPDATE: I've been reminded that the Wall Street Journal editorial board likes to take pot shots at pacifists and humanitarian workers, and that it is generally a clearing-house for nasty snark. When I linked to it, I didn't mean that Marla Ruzicka actually admired Castro; I only meant to say that people seem to be saying that, and to ask, Why do we always have to do that?

I also neglected to mention, in my comparison of Pat Tillman and Marla Ruzicka, how much better I think she did with her life than he did with his. On an emotional level, I admire both, but helping innocent victims is always better than fighting a war, even if you think the war is just, because the suffering of innocents is infinitely more offensive to the human race than going to war for ideals is beneficial to it. I regret not mentioning this.